African American Folktales

by Roger Abrahams

  Perhaps “liar” seems too strong a term for the teller of these rambunctious doings; in fact, I would not use it if it were not the word that keeps coming up in black discussions of the entertainments they produce. A more pointed and resonant black term for what is happening is signifying, playing around by pitting words against each other, characters against each other, just to see what kind of response they will get from being thrown together. In “The Signifying Monkey,” the concept simply means stirring things up for their own sake. But the term can mean much more than that, for signifying is one of those bedrock black terms that can be self-contradictory—that is, it comes to mean one thing and its opposite at the same time. (Think of how “bad” came to mean “very good” for a while in “hip” talk.) Signifying can refer, as it does in standard English, to the ability of a word or act to carry deep meanings to the surface. But when used in the black sense of the term, it draws on both the standard definition and the strategy of testing and even casting doubt on the ability to bear the conventional meanings. Signifying, then, becomes a stance toward life itself, in which the significance of a reported action cannot be interpreted as meaning only one thing, for it may convey many messages at the same time, even self-contradictory and self-defeating ones.

  To the outside world, such signifying is sometimes regarded as a mark of irresponsible irreverence; it may make serious matters seem playful, the subject of banter. But this is exactly what is intended in the world of nonsense, to use the West Indian term for signifying; it provides a context in which the community encourages its wits to test the limits of meaning by exploring the edges of believability, all of this in the service of expressive resilience and improvisational creativity. Nonsense or signifying, then, is not always merely playing around, for the most serious concerns of community life are brought into the discussion, and much is learned about how life ought to be lived, even when the illustrations for the virtuous life are couched negatively and are laughed at as acts of negation.

  The strategy of being able to signify is especially useful in dealings with those who have greater power than the good talkers. In the Afro-American world, populated largely by blacks and yet commonly under the political and economic control of whites, the usefulness of learning wariness and counteractive devices of wit is obvious. Again, to paraphrase Uncle Remus in talking about why the animals acted as they did: “In those days the creatures were obliged to look out for themselves, most especially those that didn’t have horns or hooves. Br’er Rabbit now, didn’t have any horns or hooves so he had to be his own lawyer.”

  A number of stories presented this point of view in lesson form, lessons that black children needed to learn in their dealings with the “white-folks’ world.” They were lies that taught important truths, such as the time Sis Goose was caught by Brer Fox while she was swimming around the pond. She got really annoyed about that because she felt that she had every right to swim there; so she took Fox to court. But when they got into court and Sis Goose looked around, the sheriff, he was a fox; and the judge, he was a fox too; and the attorneys, they were all foxes, as were the jurymen. So they tried old Sis Goose, convicted her, and executed her there right on the spot, and soon were picking on her bones. The moral: “When all the folks in the courthouse are foxes and you are just a common goose there ain’t gonna be much justice for colored folk.”3

  This kind of mordant message is far from uncommon, even in the jokes of the more urbanized talkers. For instance, a common joke heard often in my first field experience (in South Philadelphia) portrays another lesson—this time between an old dog and his young protégé—and hammers home in even rawer terms its message of wariness. The old dog decided to take his young charge out on the street to learn its ways. They walked from place to place, and at each stop the old dog smelled an object (a garbage can, a fireplug, and so on), and the young one followed suit. Finally, they encountered a “she-dog,” which the old dog smelled, nuzzled, and “jumped up on her and knocked himself off a piece.” So the young dog did the same. Later, when the old dog was quizzing the young one on what he had learned, the latter admitted he was a little perplexed about things. “What’s the idea of being out in the world? I don’t see any rhyme or reason to it.” To which the old one replied, “Well son, my only advice is anything in this world you can’t smell, eat, or make love to, piss on it.”4

  One of the important things to bear in mind when confronting such stories is that signifying is properly carried out on street corners or wherever young men joke with one another when they are out of the house and sounding with their friends. Otherwise, they open themselves up to the force of the proverb “Signifying is worse than dying” from those demanding respectful, straightforward talk. However, the subject of men is discussed in similar terms among women, and adults of both sexes often go on at length about the unreliability of children! Tales that tackle, directly or obliquely, how to make the most out of life, especially how to conduct one’s relationships with members of the opposite sex, are not only common but distinctively widespread throughout Afro-America, extending from the streets of South Philadelphia, in the story above, to the most remote runaway (or Maroon) communities of Surinam on continental South America. As Richard Price noted in his anthropological survey of one such community: “The Saramakas quite generally operate from a position of mistrust. Proverbs and folktales are loaded with warnings about confiding in anyone.… Deception is an expected aspect of all social relations.”5 There is a strong attempt to keep one’s doings to oneself and to operate with others as if the phrase “nobody’s business but my own,” which one hears often in songs (as well as in response to gossip), encapsulates an entire philosophy of life. This does not imply, by any means, that such gossip is forbidden or even looked down on, for no small community would be able to operate effectively unless everyone knew everybody else’s story. Moreover, not to be talked about is not to be a member of the community. The key in such village or neighborhood situations is not to prevent being talked about but to control as much as possible what is being said about you, to control your name as fully as possible, often by making choices about whom you leak information to and under what conditions you hide it.

  The problem of maintaining any kind of privacy in the small community, whether village or neighborhood, is great indeed. The danger is greatest when private events threaten to become public in a way that will bring shame to those involved, especially in those cases where an argument takes place. When a fight begins in a family, it might seem helpful to bring in a go-between to help judge the situation. But to do so is to introduce the further complication arising from the distrust one has learned for discussing one’s business with anyone else, no matter how trustworthy. Indeed, a great number of proverbs and stories make precisely this point. For instance, in Surinam, they tell of the time when Anansi and Cockroach had a contest to see who could climb highest. What Anansi forgot was that cockroaches can fly when they need to, so when he got to the top, he found himself beaten. They proceeded to argue about whether flying had been included in the original wager, but they couldn’t decide the question between themselves. So they had to find a judge; and who did they call but Fowlcock to settle the dispute. He came and looked over the situation and the two friends that had had such a falling out, and he puffed out his chest and began to crow: “Come over here! Come over here!” So they went over to hear his verdict, and just as Cockroach got over near him, he gave one big peck and ate him up. If you can’t trust the judge, who can you trust?6

  Mistrust pervades these stories as a direct reminder of how careful people should be in life. Perhaps more important, such stories often serve as roundabout techniques for talking about how one person is acting with others in the community without having to call out anyone’s name. They draw on native wisdom for addressing recurring problems, suggesting how they may be taken care of, and doing so without making any personal reference to anyone who happens to be facing that problem at the moment.


  It might be argued, then, that stories both reflect and refract reality, for people who entertain and instruct one another in face-to-face ways need to hide their words sometimes. Moreover, hiding words by couching them in impersonal nuggets of wisdom may give the storyteller a greater sense of power simply because the use of indirection is often the clever and masterful way by which the oral artist operates. Even a scandal song or play that reenacts some especially ludicrous or antisocial activity in the community must be reenacted by making up nicknames for the miscreants.

  II

  I might not even have to get into this aspect of storytelling were it not that, on their face, so many of these tales appear to confirm certain stereotypical notions about Afro-Americans, some of the very ideas that I set out to dispel in putting this work together. By bringing together these tales, I may seem to subscribe to the notion that they are models of trickery to get around Old Master, or models of directed deceit and anger to get back at Whitey. In fact, they are models of how not to act in most cases, and they are told under conditions in which the action is so frenzied and so replete with acts of social disruption that the audience can only shake its collective head in wonder while laughing at the audacity (or gullibility) of all creatures great and small.

  One of the most important dimensions of this deliberate nonsense is in the language in which the stories are cast. As noted in the Preface, when the slaves were first brought to the New World, they had a ready-made lingua franca that some of them had learned in West Africa and by which they could communicate. Often, it was a matter of survival to be able to communicate in a language that was only partially understandable to the slaveholder and overseer, and so this Creole tongue began to take on some of the symbolic properties of a secret language (more strongly in some areas of the New World than others). Among other things, changes in the meanings of words—changes that sometimes amounted to complete transvaluation—were encouraged by the slaves’ underclass situation. Words came to mean the opposite of what they mean in standard speech. I do not mean to overstress this subversive capacity of the language because we have only limited examples of this expressive strategy. It is more important for an understanding of the art of storytelling to realize that the slaves themselves recognized that the whites considered this speech system to be a mere imitation of whites (the vocabulary, remember, was predominantly English or French) and a poor one at that—the slaves were “murdering the language.” The use of patois, then, confirmed the white stereotype of blacks as uncivilized, a fact that hardly went unnoticed by the blacks.

  Clearly, the ability of blacks to speak in the standard European vernaculars was considerably greater than acknowledged by the slaves and their descendants. Every once in a while, a white would overhear a ceremony or some other event of high seriousness and would notice the black speaker’s fluency in the elegant turn of phrase and the eloquent quotation. But, given the twists and turns of the plantocrat mentality, this too was regarded as a bad imitation of white oratory and was more or less dismissed from the record. Nevertheless, it is clear from journal accounts that the high value placed on eloquence in Africa had been translated effectively into various Afro-American forms of eloquent and ornate speechmaking. Moreover, such speaking was associated with the orderly and respectable household and church; the broadest Creole was employed with crossroad and street-corner good-timing behavior. A firm distinction is commonly made by the “good talkers” of Afro-American communities between low status, deep Creole (called talking bad, patois, broken talk, talking country, among other things), and a respectable way of speaking, often involving hypercorrect forms, and referred to as talking sweet (and not in the sense of using language to romance someone!) Thus there is a contrast made between ways of speaking that carries with it the social contrast between public and private worlds, and between respectable behavior and orderliness, and seeking after a reputation.

  These stories are self-consciously delivered in the deepest of broad talk and thereby represent the most artful deployment of that language. It is therefore extraordinarily difficult for non-Creole-speakers to understand, especially because some of the best storytellers enliven the narration by going more and more quickly, using a lot of sound effects and often giving each of the important characters a special way of talking. These are not stories of language gone out of control, but are entrancingly and energetically delivered examples of talking bad on purpose. They represent a kind of linguistic liberation that contrasts both with the way Old Master talked and with the ornamental speechmaking that takes place in church or at wedding feasts, baptisms, and other formal occasions. In this situation, talking black is the language of action and energy and is strongly associated with males and public places (the street corner, the rum shop, the crossroads, wherever hanging out, or as they put it in the Caribbean world, liming and blagging, takes place). Talking bad, then, establishes its place in the speech system by contrast with the orderly and formal codes of behavior observable on those occasions that bring together the whole family and community. And talking sweet is strongly associated with good manners, and with paying appropriate respect to those in the community that deserve it, especially older women.

  This talking sweet is widely observable as the prestige form of serious speech in Afro-American communities throughout the New World. Speaking in this manner elevates the status of the speakers as they address themselves to the important subject of how to endure with dignity and respect. Being able to master such speech is to startle the audience members into attention and provide them with a sense of the possibility of a different kind of mastery—a dominion over their lives and their souls. Many traveler-observers of black life in the American South overheard such talk but only half understood that something culturally different was taking place. For instance, Joseph Holt Ingraham noted that, on occasion, blacks were to be found “collecting in little knots in the streets, where, imitating the manners, bearing, and language of their masters, they converse with grave faces and in pompous language, selecting high hard-sounding words” to dazzle those auditors who did not have as great a verbal command.7 Such commentary is one of the staples of observers of Caribbean life as well.8 In perhaps its broadest (and most insidious) form, this speechmaking and other high-style behaviors made their way into the minstrel show as a major way in which black “pretensions to respectability” could be lampooned.

  III

  From the early nineteenth century well into the twentieth, the minstrel show was the most popular form of entertainment, not only in the American South, but throughout the United States. In England and the rest of Europe it found very large audiences as well; Americans were assumed to be able to perform “coon songs” wherever they went. Elevated forms of speech, of course, were hardly the most common form of black speech that provided material for parodies on the minstrel stage. Indeed, several of the most dramatically distinctive Afro-American styles of doing things were brought to the attention of Americans through explicit white imitations of blacks onstage. These shows drew much of their dance material, as well as certain other Afro-American styles of walking, dressing, and interacting, and developed a distinctly American entertainment form that included the song and dance and came to symbolize not only the black-face show but the racist southern world out of which the stage form grew. Indeed, Jim Crow originally was simply one of the stock characters in a minstrel show; “Jump, Jim Crow” was the song that gave him his name. This was noticed by W. J. Cash, one of the most insightful southern white commentators on the etiquette of race relations. “With Jim Crow we see manifested the deepest kind of ambivalence of the Southerner toward their black charges who they dominated and intimidated but could not help but imitate and even lean on: thus, they deployed the black-face, the ‘broken speech,’ the sentimental and satiric songs and dances as a way of exploring their misgivings about their precarious hold on social order and even psychological stability.” Cash continues: “What is worth observing also is that the Negro, with hi
s quick, intuitive understanding of what is required of him, and his remarkable talents as a mime” caught these conventional “figures” and their stereotypical styles and “bodied them forth so convincingly that his masters were insulated against all questions of their reality.…”9 What Cash began to glimpse (albeit from the “liberal” perspective that views black culture primarily through the ways it is borrowed from by whites) was the dynamics of an Afro-American expressive system that was considerably wider and deeper than any stereotypical perspective could render. When black speaking could be interpreted as a misunderstanding of white standard talk, then things in black dialect could be (and were) drawn on for comic purposes. But as many concerned whites discovered, as soon as one came to know individual blacks intimately, the stereotype began to dissolve, and the degree and intensity of cultural exchange and respect had to be acknowledged.

  On those occasions when the cool, high style of self-presentation was observed, however—blacks displaying themselves to one another in what today might be called “styling-out”—the white reaction was commonly one of amused derision, seeing the effort as simply one more bungled black attempt to imitate white cultural practices. Styling-out was expressed in a wide range of dress and a parading style of public walking (imitated by whites in the famous cakewalk of the minstrel show), as well as in oratorical forms of speech. These oratorical forms were mimicked in hypercorrect and ultracorrupted fashion in the “fancy talk” speeches, also found in black-face shows, providing white anecdotalists with a subject for many of their most popular routines, stories in which a character attempts to use jaw-breaking words but manages only to come up with malapropisms. The minstrel show usually imitated a limited range of black traditional display forms and then only for the purpose of depicting plantation life through the playful antics of the singing, dancing, joking happy slave. That this depiction had little to do with real plantation life is almost beside the point; it was the only form in which whites could acknowledge and tolerate black culture. Moreover, after the Civil War, this popular form of entertainment was seized upon by blacks themselves. They formed troupes that found ready audiences wherever they traveled, especially outside the United States.